Wendigo of the Hurricane
Prologue Saturday morning, April 15th. Hurricane warnings have swept the entire city, and the high winds are beginning to file in, and the four sorority sisters of the Omega sector have gathered together in the den of their precious home. Their leader of the sorority, Jamie, is gone somewhere unknown, and they are wondering desperately where she could be. "Sarah, she's been gone for a while now," Cassie, one of the sorority girls says. She pushes back her long blonde hair behind her pink jacket, and focuses her attention back onto her candle. The lights are out from the high wind pressure, and it is beginning to rain. "We can look for her. She's probably with her boyfriend in the frat house down the road," Sarah replies. She blinks twice and then looks over to the front door of the complex. She, being a portly tomboy, sits out with a comic book and a bag of chips in her lap. "It's getting bad, though," Abigail, the third sister, says to her sorority brethren. She brushes her black hair in front of her eye to simulate her inner thoughts of being Gothic or emo. She stands up and pulls back the blinds to the window to see nothing but mist arising from the streets. Her black shirt sags downward as she turns back to her sorority sisters. "She's the sorority leader, Abigail," Cassie says. "Nobody cares about Jamie, Cassie," Christina, the final sorority sister mutters, blowing out her candle and standing up from the group. "Where are you going?" Sarah asks. "To bed. Wake me up when the boogieman gets you, okay?" Christina says, walking off into a hallway to find her bedroom. "Forget her. I say we look for her. She could be stuck in her car or something, right?" Cassie asks. "If we look for her, we have to go now," Abigail says, looking back to Cassie. The two squint at Sarah as if to force her to agree. Christina emerges from her room with an umbrella. "Fine, since you really want to find the hag, we'll go together!" Christina scorns, throwing the umbrella down at Cassie. She gracefully picks it up and walks over to the front door of the row, and lifts the hatch to walk outside. Outside, rain beats down on the cars and umbrella. The wind blows rapidly, and Cassie calls for her sorority leader, "Jamie!" "Cassie!" A distressed voice calls back. Surprised, she beckons her sisters to follow her outside. Then there, they march out into the parking lot and squint their eyes in the direction of Jamie's distress call. They march onward to find a woman waving her hand by an old sorority row home that was abandoned because of a fire. The girls make their way over to the old and singed sorority row. They walk up to meet a skinny woman with short brown hair, and walk inside. There isn't anyone else but her in there, and so the girls happily sit down on a couch. "Where is everyone?" Cassie asks. "The boys left me here. I hate this storm; it's locked me in over here. This place is freaky, too--there's creaking and stuff going on and it was really freaky. Good thing my girls came to get me, though!" Jamie exclaims. A door behind them, leading down into a basement, flies open suddenly, and a gust of wind flows by their feet. Chapter One "I wonder if that's your boyfriend, Jamie?" Abigail asked teasingly. "Probably. Get out of there, Chad, it ain't working!" Jamie teases. "Sounds like some horror cliche joke, Jamie," Christina says "Let's just go along with it. 'Could be fun," Jamie says, leading the girls down the stairway and into the basement. Down here, they find a dimly lit singed cavern of torn wall paper and shelves for storage. Abigail begins messing around with a shelf around the area and eventually backs off. "Nothing's down here. Could it have been the wind?" asks Cassie. "The wind doesn't open doors. Chad's hiding down here or something," Jamie says, looking around the dim room. The light of the basement stairs is only barely enough to illuminate the area. "Let's get back upstairs," Christina says, stepping in front of the girls and heading up the short set of basement stairs. Abigail begins to walk ahead but screams at the sight of a rat crossing her feet. She trips backward and smashes into a shelf, which in turn crashes through a weak wall to reveal a corridor of singed concrete. "So that's where he's hiding," Jamie says, walking over to help her friend up. Rubbing her shoulder in pain, Abigail simply walks back over to the stairs and sits down on the bottom layer. Jamie steps inside to find a small box in the middle of a circle of 7 black and lit candles. Sarah steps in, and steps back out. " 'K, there's enough for me. We're going back up." The doors to the basement shut quickly, alerting everyone inside. "Chad! This isn't funny-let us out of here now!" Sarah shouts in fury. In the singed room, Jamie bends down to her knees to investigate the box. Something seems to compell her to lift the hatch and release whatever is inside. And she does, and the candles all blow out as if a gust of wind had blown them all out. She finds three pictures and three pictures only inside of this box. She lifts them out and inspects them by a lighter she pulled from her pockets. If only I had a cigarette, she thought. The first two pictures were of a girl riding a horse. The second picture, though, revealed a man watching her from the trees. He had on, from what could be made out, a tuxedo. The left side of his face was badly burned, and he had what looked like a stick in his right arm. He had no pupils--only a black iris. The third and final picture was torn off, but what was left behind was the smiling girl's face, revealing she had no pupils either; only a black iris. Jamie grabbed the box and walked out of the room, holding it by her side. As she left the cavern, she found the basement doors had flung back open, and the girls were standing in shock and awe. "Well? Let's go!" Jamie says, stepping up the first layer of stairs. "Don't! Someone's up there opening them and closing them--what's in your hand?" Abigail warns, and then ponders to her. "The box. I got it open. Why are you pansies staying down here, when we could be upstairs looking through this jewel?" Jamie asks. "If you go up there first, I'll go up second." And so, the girls made their way upstairs to the couches and coffee tables. Jamie laid the box down onto the table in front of her, and the girls huddled around for some warmth in the oncoming storm. There was no way to leave now. The storm was raging on and the streets were flooding. There was an immense fog outside, preventing them from even seeing from the flood. "What did you open up? 'Pandora's Box'?" Cassie asks, jokingly. "Well, some girl liked riding a horse. Maybe she's our Pandora," Jamie says, lifting up the hatch again to show the chest. The contents remained in place, and she pulled them out. She lay them onto the table for inspection, and then stands up to walk over to the window. "Who's this in the backdrop?" Sarah asks, examining the image. "What?" Jamie asks, returning and bending over Sarah's back to view the image. She sees the man in the tuxedo, and shrugs. "He looks kinda' burned," Sarah says, tilting the image over to Christina. "Oh, gasp! A burned man inside of an old and abandoned burned-down sorority house! What ever will happen next?" Christina teases, lifting herself from the couch and walking over to the window with Jamie. Knock. Knock. Knock. There are three knocks at the door suddenly. Christina looks over and walks toward it, putting her eye up to the peephole. She expected for someone to be there to tell her to leave; to tell her the place was about to be demolished when they came inside. There was nobody there, this time. "Hello?" She twists the doorknob and opens up the white door to show nothing but heavy droplets of rain and hail. Chapter Two A few times I've been around that track, So it's not just gonna happen like that, Because I ain't no hollaback girl! Christina's cell phone blares the song by Gwen Stefani before she can finally answer it. She digs it from her pockets and lifts it to her hear, "Hello?" Before someone could respond, she lifts it off of her ear to see the number is unknown and random. She didn't even recognize the area code. She expected the number to be '666-666-666' or something. She would have even accepted "1800 Bludd" or something else of the like. But no, the number was "775-5688" with an area code of "###". "Hello?" she asks again. A seemingly robotic and yet deep voice responds to her, "Hel-" the audio cuts out, and then returns, "Hel-Hel-Hello? Is any--any--any--any--any--oneeeee" Cussssshhhhhhh. The audio sounds out until eventually dropping the signal. The phone dials back a minute later, and she opens it back up to see the same number. She answers, "Hello?" "Do--do--do---doooooooo yooooouuuu--you-you like-ike-ike-ike horsessssss?" Cussssshhhhhh. "I see-see-see-see your-your--fa-a-a-a-ace," it continues to stutter until cutting out again. "Who is it?" Jamie asks. "Someone messing with us. 775-5688. Let's see here...I have an internet connection. I'll look it up on a traceback site," Christina says, logging into her phone's internet services. She types the number in on a 'whois' database, and eventually comes up with a number with several comments. Jack M.: Do u like horses? Carl Sampson: Do u like horrrrsssseeee Chris Langston: do horrsssssseeeeeeeee She shuts her phone and looks oddly around the room. "A bunch of comments about liking horses. This is stupid, Chad's going through a lot of trouble to freak us out," Christina laughs. "Let's go look for them upstairs," Jamie says, pointing to a hidden stairwell by some old boxes. The stairs have corroded with moss and burned wood. The girls walk over and shift the boxes to the side, and carefully go up the stairs. They reach the top stairwell and see a quick shadow burst in front of their eyes. "Chad?" Jamie asks, walking upwards into a hallway that is sectioned off by a wall and several bedrooms. Christina follows up behind, and steps ahead with Jamie. "Listen, Chad it isn't funny. It stopped being funny a while ago!" Jamie walks into one of the bedrooms, and the door slams shut behind her before Christina could get a single toe in. "Jamie? Jamie!" Jamie freaks out. She tries to open the door but fails to do so. She turns around to see a man. This man has a singed left side of his face, and is in a tuxedo. His eyes are completely black, and he has a fire poker (not a stick) in his right arm. His head is tilted sideways, and his right portion of the tuxedo is singed to a crisp. He has three veins sticking out of the right arm and leaking down onto the fire poker. "This isn't funny!" "Was it ever funny?" it asks in a clever tone. Jamie screams and attempts to open the door. "You and your friends are very beautiful. Very...pretty. Do you like to ride horses?" "Stay away from me!" "Why? I just want to get to know you is all. I see you've found my daughter's pictures. Was she not pretty?" "What...what are you? Leave me alone!" "I'm nobody. I'm one of them...one of them...one of them...one of them....one-of-them....one-of-them...oneofthem!" Within moments of the final 'oneofthem', Jamie is grabbed by the wrist and thrown down to the bed inside. She, laying on her back now, screams and tries to move, but can't. The mysterious figure lifts up his fire poker and giggles. He turns from a giggle to a hysterical laugh, and begins to cut his arm with the fire poker. A mirror next to the bed cracks and bursts into pieces on the floor. "Do you...do...you...know me?" he asks a seemingly odd question. He raises his weapon into the air and thrusts downward, tearing into her lower abdomen. He twists, and pulls out bits and pieces of intestine matter. He yanks out nearly a foot before ripping it off from the tail end. Jamie begins to feel faint, and notices the man carry her intestine strand up to the top of the bed. She passes out. "It's okay. Let me do all the work. Let the Wendigo do his work." Within moments, the Wendigo bites into the intestine matter, and wraps it around her neck. When the door flies open, the Wendigo is gone, and Christina stands horrified at the sight of her friend, strangled by her own intestine. "My daughter need to eat," the Wendigo whispers into her ear. Christina screams and falls to her back, turning up to see her stalker. He laughs and brandishes his fire poker into the air. "Go now. Warn them that I'm coming. We have a storm to sit through; and we will sit through it together." Chapter Three "Get the door open! We're leaving now!" Christina shouts, jumping down from the stairwell and dashing for the doorway. "What was all that noise?" Cassie asks, standing up. "This sick thing...it ripped her open and strangled her with her own--ugh! Get outside we have to go, now!" The door flies open, and the girls stampede outside into the fog. They suffer through minutes of hail and rain pounding their faces. Within minutes, they have returned to the sorority home they had just emerged from. "Impossible! We just ran a mile at the least away from this place!" Christina screams out. "It wants us here, whatever it is," Sarah mutters. "Not true! We can leave! We have to be able to! This isn't...isn't possible!" Christina shouts just as her phone rings again. This time, the tone is a simple vibration. She answers it, "What do you want you sick-" "Dooo-do-do-dooo youuuuuuuu give-give-give----u-up?" it mutters out. "Listen you freak: let us go now!" "I-I take that as-as a n-no-no no no no." The phone grows silent, and then the noise changes to the sound of a child rapidly chewing on something and laughing. "My-my-my-my gi-guueeerl, (girl) would like-ike-ike to speak-eak-eak to yo-ou." "Hi Christina." She shoves the phone shut and slides it into her pocket. "We have to go back to the house," she says, holding Cassie and Sarah's hands, and then making their inevitable trip inside. Back inside, the girls smell a faint and disgusting smell of burning flesh. They gather together on the couches in the wide open, with Cassie contemplating what to do. "So," she says, "We have a demon hunting us down with his cannibalistic daughter, and we're trapped here until we all die? This makes about as much sense as murdering rabbits to make a quilt!" "We could hide until the storm passes over," Sarah suggests. "It'll get us if we do that. Think about it, it's like we're living a horror story. Every possible cliche can happen and probably will. The next thing you know, someone will be holding a knife to our throats begging us to go to sleep!" Cassie shouts in pure terror of the situation. "Calm down, Cassie. We'll make it through this. This storm will end off eventually, right?" she says. She brings her friends with her to the basement doors. "There could be something down here," Christina says, looking down at the doors. "Candles," Abigail mentions. "Candles. We can light them with something to keep light on us at all times," Christina says. Abigail lifts open the basement hatch and they all step down. Inside of the, again, dimly lit basement, the girls discover a lantern hung over a latch on the eastern wall. "That wasn't there before now was it?" Sarah asks. "No, it wasn't." Christina wanders over and lifts it off of the latch. The wall then collapses with the latch, revealing a torn down hallway and a door at the end of the hall. Christina eerily steps forward and opens the door up to find supplies. Several tons of lantern oil and wick lie inside. She grabs some canisters and sets the lantern ablaze, giving light to the entire room. It's at this moment that she sees another weakened wall from the fire. She goes back into the basement area to inspect it, and discovers another hidden door. She opens it up and steps inside to a bluely lit room full of boxes and books. "Seems ominous," Abigail says, looking inside with Christina. "Seems dangerous," Cassie warns. "We have no choice but to go in. We're all together, right? We'll be fine if we stick together," Christina says, gathering with her sorority sisters. They venture inside of the old room to find several hundred books over the occult and demon worship. "This place burned down, leaving all of this stuff behind? The sisters that died here...I wonder if this is all theirs?" Sarah ponders aloud. "This is all crazy. I don't like being here--can we please leave?" Abigail asks. "No! We have to keep going or we won't ever escape! We're sitting ducks, Abigail!" Christina shouts at her. Within a glance of a second, Sarah is pulled to the ground and drug into the basement once more. She screams until the door slams onto them, locking and trapping the girls inside. The phone rings, and Christina answers it to hear the noise of eating and slicing. She drops the phone onto the ground and steps on it, crushing it into tons of pieces. She hoists the lantern up and backs up, beginning to cry at the thought of desolation and that one of her dearest friends was just murdered by this...thing. Chapter Four Inside of the hall, Christina leads Abigail and Cassie through the maze of crates and books until finding a small sitting area with three rooms behind it, all blocked off by locked doors. "I don't think this is possible anymore. There's no way this was built by the community underneath the old sorority house," Abigail says, still rubbing her shoulder from the previous fall she took. "When did this stuff start? There has to be some way to stop them..." Christina says, looking around the lounge. "...The box! When Jamie opened up that box, this crap started happening!" Abigail exclaims. "The doors flew open before it was opened," Cassie says. "Maybe it was in here, but we released its daughter from some sort of prison. Maybe we could be mean and make a huge pun: Burn the box," Christina says to her friends. "It's difficult to burn something you can't reach. I do believe we got locked in when Sarah got ripped apart," Cassie says, looking slightly shocked and upset. "Uh, just wondering--what if he can hear us?" Abigail asks. "It. Not he--it. We don't know if it can or not, but we should try to get out of here and now. If we burn the box, we can probably stop it and get out of this wretched place," Christina says, looking around. She turns around and darts into the door, using all of her body weight to attempt to knock it down. Using the combined force of the three, the door blasts open, landing onto Sarah's corpse and revealing more opened doorways. Christina urges them to the upstairs area, where they find the box sitting out on the table like it was regularly placed. However, on the couch, is the Wendigo. It turns to them and smiles, licking the fire poker and laughing. "My daughter was so beautiful on that horse, was she not? It's too bad I had to kill her like I did my wife. But it was all for destiny: We had to kill each other to be together for eternity. We are one now, don't you see?" he asks. A small girl enters the room with her hair back. She would be pretty, too, if her eyes weren't black and she didn't have such sharp teeth when she grinned. "And now we're going to be together with you girls forever. Just like we are with the girl upstairs and the one being squished by a door. How does that sound?" It asks, standing up and grabbing the box. "I like to nickname this as 'Pandora's Box'. It seems an adequate name, yes? It released your nightmare into the world." Christina, without breaking a sweat, twirls the lantern in her hand and throws it at the being. Shrieks when the floor catches fire, and accidentally drops the box. The girl, aware of the attack on her father, lunges and pounces onto Christina. It begins to shriek and claw at her chest. "Get it off!" The box slowly melts in the oncoming fire, along with the girl. She slowly turns to a walking skeleton as she claws through Christina's body. Abigail and Cassie manage to rip her off, but before she can turn to skull and bones, she manages to sink her teeth into Cassie's throat. She tumbles back, screaming. The Wendigo shrieks as well at the sight of his now dying daughter. "Marissa!" It dashes through the flame, setting itself on fire. It leaps at the skeleton, lifting it up to his face. The fire spreads to the furniture and wall, bringing it down quickly. The supports inside collapse, bringing down a portion of the upper floor. "Let's--let's go!" Christina screams out, panting for breath at the scratch marks and smoke filling the house. Cassie lie there on the floor, bleeding profusely from her neck until eventually closing her eyes. The flame engulfs her, just as the Wendigo turns and wields his fire poker out for his final stand. "You killed her you dirty horse riding tramps!" Christina and Abigail dash to the outside just as it manages to dive for Abigail's foot. It misses, and stands back up. Abigail stops on her way out and grabs a chair by a desk and smacks it against the Wendigo's head, knocking it back. It falls back into the flame and lands on the couch which is by now burning to ash. The supports in the walls of the home give out. They release, and the sorority house crumbles beneath itself. A wind gust of relief blows by the two surviving girls, releasing them from their cursed bounds. The hurricane has miraculously ended, and they are standing in the middle of the street. "How...how did this even happen?" Abigail asks, looking over to Christina. "Jamie screwed around with a box. Why do I ever listen to you girls?" she responds, turning and walking toward her real home. Abigail still stands, watching in distraught at the collapsed piece of ash. Category:Cryptids